Gareth Jones argues that with government decisions increasingly being based on ideology, charities must make sure that they use evidence to inform their lobbying.
Who remembers “evidence-based policy”? Back in the heady days of 1997, New Labour made great play of banishing ideology from its decision-making – “what counts is what works”, said Tony Blair. Of course such lofty ideals are easily lost in practice, and despite evaluation becoming a more widely accepted part of policy-making, political expediency and selective use of evidence quickly asserted itself across government.
That all seems rather quaint now ideology is firmly back in the driving seat. Take this month’s announcement that charities will be barred from using government grants to lobby Parliament.
The stated inspiration is a report from the free-market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, which offers a largely theoretical argument that money is being wasted on “government lobbying government”. It spells out two scenarios: one that governments fund charity lobbying in order to create a support base for their own policies, and the other that charities are using state funding to lobby for more funding for themselves. The obvious response to this is that if either are really the case, then the strategy is clearly not proving very successful at present!
Then there’s the Charity Commission’s recent revisions to the CC19 guidance on reserves (yes the Commission is notionally independent, but the change in its emphasis since 2010 is all too clear). In an apparently knee-jerk reaction to the collapse of Kids Company, the guidance now places heavy emphasis on the need to protect against unplanned closure, at the expense of the need to meet charitable objectives and invest in new sources of income.
Never mind that Kids Company was a very specific case that has little relevance to the sector as a whole. Or that it never would have reached the scale it did if the government had used proper grantmaking processes.
The Commission also failed to consult anyone before making the changes. This seems to be a fairly new innovation in policymaking, following in the footsteps of the Cabinet Office, which made changes to door-to-door fundraising rules in December last year without notifying or consulting either the street fundraising regulator or any of its members.
Keeping on keeping on
The charity sector isn’t alone in having to oppose poor quality policy-making. Earlier this year the New Scientist spoke out against the Psychoactive Substances Bill, saying it was passed “by mostly supine MPs after a clueless debate”. Junior doctors, meanwhile, were exasperated by Jeremy Hunt’s claim that more hospital deaths occur on the weekend, pointing out that the research paper in question emphasised that the standard of care may not have been so much the problem as the fact that people who go to hospital at the weekend tend to be sicker.
The question is, what can be done? Some in the charity sector call for more vociferous opposition to government policy, but it seems unlikely that this will have much of an effect when the audience is so unreceptive. Equally, however, charities cannot afford to meekly acquiesce to the government’s restrictions on campaigning activity.
The only option, then, is to carry on lobbying in as mature a fashion as possible, placing faith in the power of evidence and reason. As a policy professional at Citizens Advice once told me, their job can be like banging your head against a wall for years on end. But as they might have added, this only makes the successes all the more satisfying when they come.
This blog originally appeared as the leader article in Charity Finance magazine.
